If you follow the news, you may have noticed a growing number of stories about catastrophic wildfires. As defined by the United States’ Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a wildfire is an unplanned fire burning in natural or wildland areas such as forests, shrub lands, grasslands, or prairies. Human activity or natural phenomenon, such as lightning strikes or volcanic eruptions, often starts these fires.

In 2024, over 46 million hectares of the Amazon rainforest, Pantanal wetlands, and Cerrado biomes burned in Brazil, directly affecting roughly 11 million people, according to Brazil’s National Confederation of Municipalities. The same year, wildfires in the U.S. consumed approximately 3.6 million hectares in the Northwest and South. Last year, in Canada, wildfires blazed through Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and the Northwest Territories. These came on the heels of Canada’s record-breaking 2023 wildfire season, when 15 million hectares burned. All of these fires damaged forests, wildlife, homes, and businesses and interrupted transportation, communication, power, and water services. Large swaths of the Americas likewise experienced code-red air-quality alerts, as well as hospitalizations due to respiratory distress from wildfire smoke.

NASA has noted on its website that globally, the frequency and intensity of extreme wildfires has more than doubled over the past two decades. Humans may accidentally or deliberately set the majority of wildfires, but droughts and warm weather keep them burning longer and harder.

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Urban conflagrations are no less devastating. Human carelessness, poor municipal planning, outdated or flammable building materials, and more can play roles in the ignition of urban fires. Densely-packed buildings, high winds, natural disasters, and inadequate or overtaxed emergency response services increase their deadliness. While the causes of urban fires may differ from wildfires, the loss of lives, livelihoods, and property have the same impact.

Equally devastating are fires that take place at the intersection of wild and developed landscapes, or wildland-urban interfaces (WUI). This type of fire ravages buildings as well as large areas of wildland vegetation. A recent example is the 2023 fire on the island of Maui, Hawaii. Driven by wind, the WUI fire burned more than 880 hectares, destroyed over 2,200 structures, and caused $5.5 billion in damages to the historic town of Lahaina. More than 100 died.

Promoting Fire Safety Since 1904

The Great Baltimore Fire of February 1904 burned over 1,500 buildings to the ground in that U.S. city, and helped lead to the formation of the ASTM International committee on fireproofing materials. Initially dubbed “Committee P,” it would evolve into today’s 623-member committee on fire standards (E05). The group is tasked with creating fire hazard and fire risk-assessment standards that focus on, but aren’t restricted to: buildings and building materials, products, and assemblies; furnishings; mechanical and electrical appliances and equipment; and transportation facilities and equipment. Traditionally, fire safety regulations have been prescriptive, says Marc Janssens, a 2024 ASTM Award of Merit recipient and a vice chair of the committee. That approach has changed.

“What we’ve seen over the past 40-odd years is a gradual move toward actual evaluation of fire performance rather than testing to ensure that you’re complying with a prescriptive building or fire code requirement,” says Janssens, who has been involved with the committee since 1987.

Called “material flammability standards” in the U.S. and “reaction to fire tests” in other countries, this class of fire standards evaluates such things as ease of ignition, amount and rate of heat release, smoke release, and other related aspects of material and product flammability, Janssens says.

“Fire safety standards don’t deal with one product alone but a broad range of products. Everything is affected by fire,” says Marc Alam, senior manager of codes and standards—fire and acoustics, with the Canadian Wood Council and an E05 member. “Because there are so many material interests and so many people involved, these tend to be the most debated standards.”

The Heritage Standard

Over its 120-plus years in existence, the committee on fire standards has published 80 standards, the oldest of which, standard test methods for fire tests of building construction and materials (E119), dates back to 1918.

“It’s been a base standard for almost everything within fire resistance. Every other standard has its heritage in E119,” says Herbert Stansberry, chair of the subcommittee on fire resistance (E05.11).

The venerable standard is used to assess the ability of building elements, usually wall assemblies but also floor, roof, and load-bearing specimens, to contain a fire, retain their structural integrity, or achieve both during a fire test. It measures the transmission of heat and gases, flame spread, and the degree to which the building element produces smoke, toxic gases, and other combustive products.

“Over the years, there hasn’t been anything truly innovative that’s changed in E119. It’s more a matter of modernization, of constantly looking to make sure we’re still applicable to the materials and processes that currently exist,” says Stansberry, program manager of technical business and innovation initiatives with Intertek. “E119 is a framework that allows you to test other things that are not specifically outlined and it gives guidance for those more common elements. Things like roof hatches are not directly specified in E119, but you can test to them using E119.”

Surface-Burning Characteristics

Developed by Underwriters Laboratories (UL) in the 1920s and formally adopted by ASTM in 1961, the standard test method for surface burning characteristics of building materials (E84/UL 723) provides flame-spread and smoke-development indices. It is one of the most frequently cited ASTM standards in U.S. building codes and has been a staple in fire testing for decades.

Managed by the subcommittee on surface burning (E05.22), the standard has roughly six work items in progress, including WK53299, a revision to the standard test method for surface burning characteristics of building materials (E84). This proposed revision would create an annex section for wood joints in E84.

“How and where you position the joints on the test specimen can have a dramatic impact on the performance,” says Tim Earl, president of Earl Code Solutions, which specializes in fire codes and standards. “This work item attempts to standardize it so you’ll have confidence that when you look at two different test reports, they were tested in the same manner.”

Another work item (WK77776), also a revision to E84, addresses the problem with ceiling-mounted materials that melt, drip, and then burn on the floor. At present, a tester could report that no further burning is taking place on the ceiling, but the tester isn’t required to record the fire that’s occurring on the test’s tunnel floor.

The tunnel used in E84 is the 25-foot-long Steiner Tunnel. Created by Al Steiner at UL in the 1940s, it measures the surface-burning behavior of building materials. WK77776 proposes to make the reporting of floor-flame spread part of E84, a practice that already exists in UL 723.

Robust fire-safety standards can help with safety as well as building resiliently.

Earl points out that when E84 was developed, construction materials were very different from today’s. Foams, thermoplastics, and other specimens that drip ahead of the flame front were not known. “Mounting methods, which are referenced in section six of E84, have been the band-aid that allows E84 to be used for more modern materials,” he says. “When talking about these materials, the building code will say, ‘This material needs to be tested to E84 using the specific mounting method developed by E05 for that material.’”

Harmonization

In addition to UL and ASTM, there are several standards-development organizations, including the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO), that produce fire safety standards. NFPA and ASTM have an agreement to avoid duplicating efforts and harmonize similar standards, says Mike Luna, president of Priest and Associates Consulting.

“Building codes often adopt multiple standards, which may not be harmonized,” Luna says. “One test result may be less stringent than another, leading manufacturers to choose the easier standards for testing. That’s why harmonization is so important.”

Once a standard is incorporated into a building code, such as the International Code Council’s (ICC) International Building Code, it becomes part of regulation and is enforceable.

The technical director of UL Solution’s Built Environment, Dwyane Sloan, is one of the many dedicated ASTM volunteers leading efforts to maintain alignment of standards, such as ASTM’s and UL’s fire standards. Sloan says that, in many instances, ASTM and UL Standards and Engagement possess similar standards.

“When the standards are very similar, as surface burning characteristics of building materials (E84 and UL 723) are, both are referenced in building codes, side-by-side, and are regarded as equivalent standards. When code officials are assessing a product for code compliance, they look at these standards as being equivalent, so we try our best to keep them aligned as closely as possible,” says Sloan, a vice chair of the committee on fire standards (E05).

The fire standards committee anticipates adding some UL 723 practices to E84, including guidance on how to evaluate, average, and display test results when multiple tests are conducted. As mentioned previously by Tim Earl, the committee is also looking at mounting procedures.

Sloan added, “When mounting practices are developed at ASTM, then proposals are often made to incorporate those references into UL 723.”

Smoke, Models, and Fire Barriers

Along with E119 and E84, the fire standards committee has many other influential standards, including the standard test method for heat and visible smoke release rates for materials and products using an oxygen consumption calorimeter (E1354).

“The calorimeter is a small-scale device that allows us to quantitatively measure the vulnerability characteristics of materials under a range of thermal exposure conditions,” Janssens says. “It was an important breakthrough and a milestone in our ability to do performance-based analysis using computer models to simulate fire growth in a room.”

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Janssens cites another standard, the test method for specific optical density of smoke generated by solid materials (E662), as one of the most frequently used fire test methods throughout the world. It provides a relative measure of a material’s smoke production during a fire. This test method or a variation of it (E1995) is specified in fire safety regulations for passenger aircraft, ships, and trains.

The use of fire models – mathematical models that calculate fire behavior and fire safety – has expanded beyond the realm of the research lab to fire services, engineering, and legal communities. To ensure that the proper fire models are selected, used, and understood, the subcommittee on fire safety engineering (E05.33) has published the standard guide for evaluating the predictive capability of deterministic fire models (E1355). Intended for use by fire-model developers and users, developers of model codes, approving officials, and educators, it outlines the procedure for validating a particular fire model.

Another standard, the test method for determining fire resistance of perimeter fire barriers using intermediate-scale, multi-story test apparatus (E2307), recently underwent revision. Drafted by the subcommittee on fire resistance in 1996, the standard tests the fire resistance of the joint between the floor assembly and the exterior wall assembly, or façade, of a building. “The floor of the building is almost always fire-rated, but the façade seldom is. So, you have to test for the fire rating of an element that transitions between rated and non-rated,” Stansberry says.

“Since drafting this in 1996, we’ve seen significant changes in architectural standards and design, such as more and more vision glass extending from the floor slab to the ceiling of a building, resulting in challenges in methodology that hadn’t been anticipated when originally drafted,” he says. “The subcommittee has tried to evolve the standard so that it remains applicable even though changes in construction could potentially make it difficult to test to it.”

Future Standards

The subcommittee on external fire sources (E05.14) has several work items in progress related to fire safety, including one that addresses the charring depth of wood utility poles (WK63252) and another on exterior walls on residential spaces.

“We’re also working on a new exterior wall fire propagation standard that is intended to evaluate fire spread on Type 5 buildings or residential exterior walls,” says Sloan. “This test involves a standardized fire exposure at the bottom of a 16-foot exterior wall assembly. We seek to have a test method that adequately assesses this flame travel on the exterior of buildings. We want to mitigate the hazard of fire propagating quickly up the wall or into a home’s attic space.”

The external fire sources subcommittee has also revised the standard test methods for fire tests of roof coverings (E108). Its test methods measure the flame’s surface spread and the ability of the roof covering to resist fire penetration from the exterior to the underside of a roof deck. Additionally, the tests methods provide criteria for determining if the roof material will develop flying burning material, or flying brands, when exposed to a 12 mph (5.3 m/s) wind.

In response to the U.S. West Coast fires, addressing fire protection through WUI standards has become increasingly important. This will drive greater activity for committee E05, Luna says.

“Building codes will be updated, which, in turn, will drive the development of new, innovative materials that will shape future test protocols,” he says. “ASTM will focus on making sure all necessary changes for these new materials are properly addressed.”

At the end of the day, the work of the committee on fire standards aims to keep people safer from, and safer during, a fire. “In E05, we deal with life safety in everything we do,” Stansberry says. “We look at things that affect public buildings and that could potentially be a life-or-death situation for the people in those buildings. All of the committee members keep life-safety factors in mind every day. They try to make sure that standards address the real risks and that they keep subpar materials and assemblies from being used.” ●

Kathy Hunt is a U.S. East Coast-based journalist.